According to Data from the Washington Post there were 990 fatal police shootings in 2015. I looked through this data to find patterns. In terms of race, as I mentioned before whites outnumbered blacks in terms of fatal shootings. There were 494 whites shot dead, compared to 258 blacks. This doesn't count Hispanics who are incorrectly counted as a race. According to the 2015 census data close to 90% of Hispanics in the country are white. That is an important point because the FBI's crime data doesn't count Hispanic as a race. I already did an article about how the data doesn't make it clear that police are racist against blacks, in terms of using lethal force. Blacks are more likely to be killed per capita, but are also more likely to commit crime, and especially violent crime.
For this article I wanted to look at details of the police shootings. I looked at the unarmed category, in which 38 of those killed were black, and 32 white. There were a total of 93, out of which 34 involved an attack in progress. There were some 9 undetermined, and 50 listed as Other. If there was one category to look at to criticize police officers it would be the unarmed category, and in that category, it would seem` it would be best to look at other, as opposed to undetermined, and attack in progress. The problem for the BLM supporters is that looking at that category doesn't do much to back up their case, at least not in my view. There were some accidents. One involved police in a shootout with a suspect in a vehicle, in which they shot a passenger. Another involved Felix Kumi , a bystander who was shot by an officer who was trying to shoot someone else that pointed a gun at their head. There were a few instances of police thinking someone had a weapon when they didn't, but those were by far the minority of the 50. There were instances of people reaching in their waistband, and or pretending they had a gun. In some cases the Post didn't provide much data. Like the case of David Kassick (who was white btw). I looked up his name on google, and found an article about charges being dropped against the officer who killed him. Kassick was on the ground when he was shot, but a video showed that Kassick's hands repeatedly disappeared under his body, even as officer Lisa Mearkle told him to put his hands where she could see them. In some other instances there was a struggle, or some confrontation, but further information is not given. In some of these cases the "unarmed" person had a weapon. One rushed at officers with a large tree branch. Another refused to drop a broomstick. One man was throwing rocks at a police car. Another rammed his vehicle into cars of police, and the U.S. Marshal's Service. In another incident Joshua Omar Garcia, who was a 24 year old Hispanic man, was handcuffed in the front seat of a patrol car, and still tried to drive away, before he was shot. These are those "unarmed" people who aren't listed as an attack in progress, and even those 50 cases don't make much of a case that police are the bad guys, or racist, and certainly none of them look like premeditated murder. What would happen if I looked at the instances of those who had a deadly weapon and were shot dead by police? If the 50 instances of "unarmed" in the Others category doesn't paint a clear picture of evil police, why would the other 940 do so? I am getting ready to look some of those instances of armed people being killed by police.
References
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3305916/Cop-fatally-shot-motorist-cleared-charges.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/
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